New obsessions
Because I’m ready to make these things my entire personality
Pull Up A Chair is a weekly newsletter containing all the things I’d like to be chatting about if we could hang out together in real life.
📚 The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd. This was, without a doubt, my favourite book that I read in March. It builds on the concept of ‘paper towns’, made-up additions to maps originally used as copyright traps, by asking: what if, if you were reading the map with the extra place shown on it, it made that town real to you? One of the blurb quotes on the back says, “A story like this reminds us of why we all fell in love with reading to begin with,” and that’s 100% accurate. I was completely engrossed in the mystery in a way I haven’t been in a book for quite some time. I’d recommend it especially to fans of The Secret History, RF Kuang’s Babel, Station Eleven/ The Glass Hotel/ Sea of Tranquility or Books By The Wizard School Lady, especially if you’re into Marauders-era stories (Amazon | Bookshop affiliate links - ads).
🎀 Skinny scrunchies. We are five years into articles claiming the resurgence of the scrunchie, which shows how late to the trend I have been. For me, it took mostly working from home since 2020 to really get into the scrunchie. In order to concentrate, I like to pull my hair back away from my face (I blame Violet Baudelaire), but on Teams calls, when my hair is tied back, it looks like I don’t have any at all - so I end up just knotting it up with a scrunchie so it’s easy to let down when I want to. As well as the traditional wide scrunchie, I also like a thin or skinny scrunchie - especially to go around the end of a plait or to decorate my bun for ballet (and hide how messy it is!). I have a set that I bought at Galaries Lafayette in Nice in September, but they’re available at a range of price points, from £7 for 5 to £39 for 6 (but they’re silk!!). It occurs to me also that it would be very easy to make my own narrow scrunchies… watch this space.
🛍️ Monica Vinader engraved jewellery. I was 100% influenced into this by the lovely Olivia Muenter, who mentioned that she had a phrase she wanted to remember engraved into the reverse of a necklace, so that she could see it every day. Since the start of social distancing in 2020, I have been repeating the phrase ‘survival is insufficient’ to myself. It comes from Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven (and I think maybe originally from Star Trek), and it’s become a motto to me. I use the phrase ‘necessary, but not sufficient’ quite a lot (I blame studying maths and also democratisation theory), and this motto absolutely builds on that - survival is necessary, but on top of that I want to live, to thrive. When I can get over the logistical barriers (and yes, also my nerves) I want to get a tattoo of it on my inner forearm, so I can see the phrase every single day - but in the meantime, having it on a gorgeous pendant, hanging against my skin, will absolutely do the job. I used code REBECCA20, belonging to Rebecca at Everyday Parisian, to get 20% off, and the necklace was delivered in a gorgeous pouch and box. It turns out there’s a huge range of jewellery you can get personalised, whether for a gift or for yourself.
(I’ve put a close-up picture in which it’s easier to see the words right at the end of the newsletter under my sign-off.)
Earlier this week I took myself off to the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh to see Matthew Bourne’s production of Sleeping Beauty. If the name ‘Matthew Bourne’ rings only a faint bell to you - he’s the choreographer behind the famous re-imagining of Swan Lake with be-feathered men playing the swans, as well as the gorgeous Red Shoes which I saw on its 2017 tour. If you’ve seen the film of Billy Elliot, there’s (spoiler alert!) a bit right at the end showing Billy playing one of Bourne’s male swans.
Sleeping Beauty, though? I’m ready to make it my entire personality. The production design is incredibly clever, with well defined ‘acts’ each with a totally different visual style. The team have achieved things which I didn’t even know were possible in a touring show. The opening section, set in 1890 with Aurora as a baby, has a set with grand pillars to each side, as in traditional stage sets at London’s Royal Opera House and other big-name ballet venues - and some absolutely hilarious puppet-work. We see the fairy variations, as in the original ballet, and begin to see the effect of the outrageously clever staging - two travelators run from side-to-side towards the back of the stage, allowing the fairies to fly and glide across the stage. The vibe is deliciously gothic.
(Photo from the production’s website)
Then we see 21-year-old Aurora at her birthday party, sneaking off with the gardener she loves and being forcefully wooed by Caradoc, son of the evil fairy Carabosse. There are light waltzes, including the famous Once Upon A Dream which Disney used for their film adaptation. In order to tell the story he wanted to, and create more emphasis for individual characters’ themes, Bourne moved the original score around a bit, so the music all comes from Tchaikovsky’s original composition (which runs for almost three hours in its entirety!) but presented in a different order.
After 100 years of sleep, we are in 2011, and we see a group of teenagers in hoodies and ear flap hats (yes, as a teenager in 2011, I felt a cringe of recognition) taking selfies and play-acting in front of the palace gates, before a young man with jeans and a little pair of wings appears, to take us back into fairyland. The dance style is more contemporary, with blindfolds, and dry ice, and trees filling the set. It’s completely gorgeous. Caradoc lures the young man towards Aurora, to kiss her awake, and then casts him aside, to keep Aurora for himself. We see Caradoc’s lair, which is full of leather and hedonism, and Aurora is completely downtrodden.
Of course, there’s a happy ending - this is a fairy tale, after all.
It was the aesthetic of that first act, then the hints of it we saw in the 2011 section, that really captured me. One review described the fairies as having a ‘luxury-meets-feral-punk aesthetic: mussed-up hair, shredded skirts, Gothic wings, and a robber’s mask of eye shadow’, and honestly, I would be ready to hand in my carefully crafted ‘academic - practical - feminine’ style words (a la Allison Bornstein’s three-words method) in favour of this look if it were at all practical for my day-to-day life. And the young man, with little wings, and a hoodie, and eyeliner… he could have stepped straight out of the fan-art my friends and I were drawing in our teens, or out of one of the costume drawings I made when I was running the wardrobe department for my youth theatre.
Unfortunately, there’s only a short time left in this tour, so unless you’re in Newcastle or Amsterdam, you’re out of luck. A number of Bourne’s shows are available to watch at home, and the next show to take the stage is his (apparently incredibly sexy) update of Romeo & Juliet, which has its opening at Leicester’s Curve theatre in July, and then coming in November is Edward Scissorhands. I’ll be doing my best to see both shows. Meanwhile, if you fancy the big Marius Petipa/ Frederick Ashton version with a full orchestra, the Royal Ballet are kicking off a run of shows of it at the Royal Opera House at the start of May. I saw that show in 2010 or so and it was fantastic, even in the very cheap seats (this was in the days of £5 seats right up at the top of the theatre).
On the subject of price - I always recommend getting seats higher up for ballet - it’s true that you don’t see the finest details, but you instead get to see the choreography across the whole of the stage and the patterns created by the dancers, and these seats are generally much cheaper than the stalls closer to the stage. Especially in Matthew Bourne shows, there are always things happening around the edges. My personal favourite seats are usually in the front row of the upper circle: they’re usually ‘restricted view’ making them slightly cheaper, but in exchange for having a safety bar in your field of vision, you don’t have to see the heads of any of the people sitting in front of you. I find that it makes the viewing experience feel incredibly intimate, especially when I go to the theatre alone. Here was my view for this show:
What a stunning theatre - all this plush decoration was a perfect surround for the show Matthew Bourne and his company have created.
Speak soon,
Lily
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